Guest Blog: Why A DNS Partner Is Crucial For Real-Time Ad Platforms

At BLOOM Digital Platforms, we spend most of our days (and sometimes nights) developing, maintaining and running our full stack ad platform, AdGear. To outsiders, this may seem like an extremely daunting task. After all, to some extent, we compete with the likes of Google and AOL, but when it comes to the size of our engineering team, we’re much smaller. In fact, we pride ourselves on managing to maintain the agility, flexibility and nimbleness associated with small, tightly-knit teams, even (and especially) as we grow — something that permeates throughout every choice of technology and provider we make.

We feel that remaining flexible and open is a key feature for our customers, publishers and agencies who don’t consider what we do to be a commodity and it’s really what allows us to stay ahead of the game while maintaining extremely competitive pricing.

With that said, running an ad technology platform and all its supporting infrastructure is not an easy task. Maintaining our agility while growing our volume to many billions of ad requests a month demands incredible focus and dedication, which we would not be able to sustain without the help of our partners. We pick our partners carefully and demand the same level of dedication and focus from them.

Our network is built to scale while remaining extremely responsive and resilient to transient failures, hardware and network alike. DNS is especially key for us and excellent DNS query response times for our customers is the absolute bare minimum.

We need a high level of functionality, control and support from our DNS provider so that we can sleep at night and just until a year or two ago, this was hard to find.

Then we found Dyn and since then we’ve been able to leverage a DNS infrastructure which enables us to continue to do what we do best: reducing pain for our own engineering staff, all while maintaining a level of control and responsiveness we require.

In order to guarantee high availability and excellent response times, we leverage real-time traffic management service from DynECT Managed DNS to both load balance and manage failover requests to our data centers, spread out across North America and Europe. It used to be that this kind of technology required dedicated in-house staff.

For us, the Dyn team feels like an extension of our own team at a price point that allowed us to start small and grow quickly, all while keeping our costs under control.

Consequently, and to the delight of our customers, we continue to crank out new functionality in AdGear at a rapid pace, even amidst the high volume growth we’ve seen throughout the past year.

One of the things that I’ve personally appreciated about Dyn has been their willingness to grow with us, demonstrated by a proactive, receptive and dedicated account manager in Brian McCall who I cannot recommend enough. As our volume grew, Brian continually reached out to me earnestly suggesting ways to continue to save on growing costs and generally making sure everything was running smoothly for us.

Having dealt with reps who disappear or become strictly reactive after a deal is closed, I can appreciate the proactive approach Dyn has adopted. The end result has been a continued, evolving and mutually beneficial partnership.

We’ve also really enjoyed access to Dyn’s concierge staff, who have been friendly, prompt and accessible, even as we’ve debugged problems originating at a customer’s DNS infrastructure. They dug deep and put our minds at ease, which is saying a lot given how seriously we take response time and availability. The advertiser side of our platform sports a plethora of rich media ad types certified to run on all the major display networks and exchanges, most of which also monitor our response times and availability closely as well.

All in all, when it comes to something as core for us as DNS, the details matter. At the end of the day, the details make the difference. Dyn has demonstrated they care about the details and that’s why we remain happy customers.